The influence of online images on self‐harm: A qualitative study of young people aged 16–24

Abstract

To date, research on the role of the Internet in self-harm has focused on young people's interaction via the medium of text, with limited consideration of the effect of images. This qualitative study explores how young people understand and use online images of self-harm. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a community sample of 21 individuals aged 16–24 living in Wales, UK, with a previous history of self-harm. Interviewees reported the role of the Internet in normalising young people's self-harm. Images rather than textual interactions are the primary reason cited for using the Internet for self-harm purposes. Images invoke a physical reaction and inspire behavioural enactment, with Tumblr, which permits the sharing of images by anonymous individuals, being the preferred platform. Viewing online images serves a vital role in many young people's self-harm, as part of ritualistic practice. Online prevention and intervention need to attend to the importance of images.

Shaping the Design of Smartphone-Based Interventions for Self-Harm

“…However, for the purposes of this paper, we use the term self-harm to refer only to 'direct' harmful activities. Digital self-harm activities have emerged even in very general studies of adolescents' online behaviour [51] and in studies of other mental health conditions (e.g., depression [2], eating disorder [50]), however a small number of researchers have explicitly focused on online representations of self-harm [13,22,26,23,31,36,40,41,56,70]. For a review of studies relating to social media use for the discussion of self-harm and viewing of associated content (1998-2014), see Dyson et al [22].…”

Suicide and self-harm content on Instagram: A systematic scoping review

“…Compared to other social media, Instagram was found to host the greatest proportion of visual self-harm content [42]. This is relevant because previous research has suggested that imagery and visual content may have greater impact on users than text, it is more appealing, attracts more attention and may have greater triggering potential [45,49]. We found that self-harm content on Instagram elicits high levels of audience engagement, especially the more graphic and explicit it is [37,39].…”

Mining social networks to improve suicide prevention: A scoping review

“…Finally, images and videos are increasingly frequent in SNs (Marchant et al, ). Online images and videos of self‐harm seem to facilitate reproduction of these behaviors, at least among the young (Jacob, Evans, & Scourfield, ). This kind of content provide relevant information that requires the development of new automatic methods to be processed in search of suicidal indicators.…”